Tom Brown's School Days

The events are set in England in the 1830s. Tom Brown enters a boys’ boarding school. There is friendship in the school and there is bullying, with a boy named Flashman at the head of it. The headmaster, Doctor Thomas Arnold, exerts an influence of another kind. Tom grows up between those two forces. The film shows the school as a hierarchy as much as a place of education. How bullying carries on inside an institution’s own order sits at the centre of the story. The work is adapted from a novel. The eighty six minutes are spread over several years. Cedric Hardwicke and Freddie Bartholomew appear in Robert Stevenson’s American film, completed in 1940.